University of Washington

1. 1 Getting into UW is not getting into your major

   Undergraduate Advising says it plainly: "The vast majority of students enter UW as a pre-major (this includes pre-science, pre-humanities, etc.)" Your admission letter got you into the university. The major is a second admission, and there are three kinds. Open majors: "Students in good academic standing can declare the major at any time." Minimum-requirements majors: "Requires students to complete satisfactorily a set of prerequisite courses with a minimum GPA." And capacity-constrained majors: "These majors often have application forms and application deadlines; some of them require standardized tests, recommendations, and/or interviews." Computer science, most of engineering, business, nursing and a long list of others are in that third group, and not everyone who applies gets in. There is a clock on this. The satisfactory progress policy "requires students to declare a major by the time they have earned 105 credits and completed 5 quarters." Miss both and "students ... will receive a registration hold" — you cannot register for the next quarter until you declare or your adviser grants a pre-major extension, which is "typically granted for one quarter." The extension form itself asks the question every pre-major should answer in week one: "If the major is capacity-constrained, what are the open or minimum requirements major(s) you are also considering?" So: find your intended major's admission type and its prerequisite list this quarter, take those courses on the schedule the department publishes, and pick a real second choice. AP and Running Start credit count toward the 105, which is what makes some sophomores hit the wall early.

   UW Undergraduate Advising — majors and admission types UW Undergraduate Advising — satisfactory progress and the 105-credit rule
2. 2 There are no letter grades

   UW grades on numbers. From the General Catalog's grading system: "Instructors may report grades from 4.0 to 0.7 in 0.1 increments and the grade 0.0." So a transcript reads 3.7, 2.9, 3.4 — never A-, B, B+. The catalog publishes a conversion for anyone who needs letters (A is 4.0–3.9, A- is 3.8–3.5, B+ is 3.4–3.2, B is 3.1–2.9, C is 2.1–1.9, D- is 0.8–0.7), but the number is the grade. Two things follow. First, the floor: "D- 0.8-0.7 Lowest passing grade" and "E 0.0 Academic failure. No credit earned." There is nothing between 0.7 and 0.0 — a 0.7 earns the credit, a 0.0 earns none, and there is no 0.5. Second, precision cuts both ways: a professor who would have rounded a 79.6 up to a B- on a letter scale can just as easily write a 2.4, and your GPA is the average of those tenths. Ask every instructor in week one how the number is computed, because the syllabus will tell you and the letter-grade instincts you brought from high school will not. And if you are thinking of retaking something: "With the approval of the academic department offering the course, an undergraduate may repeat a course once. Both the original grade and the second grade are computed in the GPA but credit is allowed only once." No replacement, one retake.

   General Catalog — grading system
3. 3 Credits 10 to 18 cost the same. 19 does not

   From the 2026-27 autumn quarter tuition and fee schedule for the Seattle campus: a resident undergraduate pays the same tuition at 10 credits as at 18 — $3,976 for the quarter before fees at every load from 10 through 18. Then: "Per-credit surcharge for more than 18 credits: $ 422". Nineteen credits is $4,398; twenty is $4,820. Non-residents are flat from 10 to 18 as well, and their surcharge is $1,486 a credit. Read that as two facts. Fifteen credits and eighteen credits cost the same, so a fifth class in a quarter is free if you can carry it — that is how people finish in fewer than twelve quarters. And the nineteenth credit is not "a little more"; it is $422, or more than the entire U-PASS for a year. Registration has its own ceiling: "Undergraduate students are limited to 19 credits during Registration Periods I and II to allow all students a chance to develop a basic schedule." "Additional credits may be added during Registration Period III and the Late Add Period. The limit is 30 credits per quarter." So an overload is possible; it is just late, and it is billed.

   UW Finance — 2026-27 Seattle autumn quarter tuition and fees (PDF) UW Finance — quarterly tuition and fee schedules Registrar — registration policies (the 19-credit limit)
4. 4 Two years of Spanish got you in. Arts & Sciences wants three

   Undergraduate Advising: "Not all colleges require foreign language beyond UW admissions requirement of two high school years or two college quarter." The one that does is the biggest. The requirements-by-college page lists the College of Arts and Sciences as "Foreign language – through third quarter of first-year sequence (min. 2.0 required)" — and so is the School of Social Work. Built Environments, Education, Engineering, the Environment, the Information School, Foster, Nursing and Public Health: "none". The catalog's version of the Arts and Sciences rule: "coursework through the end of the first-year college sequence in a foreign language, with a 2.0 or higher grade in the third-quarter course, or demonstrate equivalent proficiency through one of the following: successful completion of the third-year or higher level of high school language instruction; by passing a proficiency examination and placing into a course beyond the first year; or by receiving a passing grade in a qualifying course beyond the first-year level." So if you stopped after Spanish 2 in high school and you are anywhere in Arts and Sciences — which is where most pre-majors and most majors live — you owe three quarters of a language, or a proficiency exam. Three high school years clears it outright. The advising page notes the proficiency test exists "for students who do not want to study a language at UW and are only looking to clear a degree requirement for language proficiency" — take it in year one, while the language is still fresh, not year four.

   UW Undergraduate Advising — foreign language UW Undergraduate Advising — requirements by college and school General Catalog — College of Arts and Sciences requirements
5. 5 Upload your textbook. Then ask it questions.

   Attach a PDF — a textbook chapter, a lecture deck, a reading, a problem set — and ask Gus about it in plain language. It reads the file, indexes it against the rest of that course's materials, and answers from the page rather than from the internet. It is not only a lookup tool. Ask it to tutor you through something that has not clicked, to quiz you on the key concepts, or to read your draft and tell you what is weak. Because it is scoped to one course, "what is actually on our reading list" is a question it can answer. And it is still the same app that pulls every deadline out of your syllabi and records your lectures. The chat just knows about all of it.

   Try Gus free

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